Welcome to Squirrel Class

2023-2024

 

 

Welcome to Squirrels, our Year 1 class. Miss Douglas is our class teacher and Ms Portwain is our teaching assistant. We have a very exciting year ahead of us! This page will be updated regularly with photos and news of all of our amazing learning. 

Please check your child's book bag regularly. The children will receive a new decodable colour book every Friday as well as a book that they have chosen to read for pleasure. 

Home Learning

Every Friday your child will take home their new red home learning book. They will have a list of words to practice reading and a list of words to practice spelling using 'Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check'. The home learning is really important and helps the children with the work they do in school.  Please can home learning books be returned to school the following Thursday.

The children have started Numbots! They have all had their login details. Just a few minutes per day is really beneficial for your child's number facts and really supports the Maths learning we do in school.

Term 5 - Our PE days are changing to Monday and Tuesday. Please wear PE kit to school on BOTH days.

Week 1 

   

 

Our PE topic is Tennis! To start our learning, we have been working on throwing, bouncing and catching. We even challenged ourselves to catch with one hand!

Our Class Trip to Beaulieu!

    

We had an amazing time at Beaulieu Motor Museum seeing the types of cars we learnt about in our Travel and Transport back in Term 3. We were even lucky enough to all have a turn riding in an Austin Clifton from the 1920s!

 

Term 4 

Welcome back to an exciting new term in Squirrel Class! Our new topic is 'Our Amazing World' where we will be learning all about the continents of the world! What continent do we live in? Have you ever or do you know someone who has travelled to a different continent?

Week 6 

   

     

Holy Week Activities! We loved our Sounds of Easter workshop with Daniel. We experienced different sounds from Holy Week including waving palm leaves, tinkling coins and crunching hammering nails. We also did a Prayer Walk around school with Fox Class, learning about different moments from the Easter Story. 

Week 5

   

   

Whole school treat using the apparatus!

Planting potatoes as part of our Science topic! They will need sun, air and rain to grow!

Week 4

       

Our PSHE topic this term is Healthy Me. We have been learning about how to keep our minds and bodies safe and healthy. This week we focussed on road safety. We learnt about how to cross the road safely with an adult. Then we did some role-play examples and created posters with our top tips.

 

Week 3

   

  

Our World Book Day outfits were amazing! We had a great day sharing our love of stories with some of the older children. Can you work out the adjectives we dressed as?

Week 2

        

In Science our topic is Plants! We have been learning about the parts of a plant and the difference between deciduious and evergreen trees. We spotted some deciduous and everygreen trees in our school grounds and identified the trunk, branches, roots, leaves and bark!

Week 1

We have been learning some really tricky Maths! We have been learning how to 'rewind' addition and subtraction stories to find the inverse equation. The children have been working so hard and it has paid off - they are super confident!

Children's Mental Health Week - Dress to Express!

Week 4 - PSHE

    

 

In PSHE we have been learning about how to work well with a partner to achieve a goal as part of our 'Dreams and Goals' topic. We discussed what successful and unsuccessful partner work looks like before working with a partner to design our own welly boot for the wet weather! We came up with some top tips for partner work:

1. Always listen to each other

2. Compromise

3. Check with your partner before you do something

4. Share the workload

5. Don't get cross! If you disagree, discuss it kindly

Week 3 - PE

     

In our indoor PE sessions we have been learning all about fitness and how exercising affects our bodies. We have been completing pirate themed workouts and seeing how our heart rate increases as we exercise!

Week 2 - Maths 

     

We have been learning all about odd and even numbers in our Maths lessons. We have used numicon shapes to learn that even numbers can be split into two odd or two even parts, and that odd numbers can be split into one odd and one even part. The children are getting brilliant at explaining their thinking and using their reasoning skills.

Week 1 - Resourceful Day 

   

    

We had a fantastic time on our resourceful day. We faced lots of challenges where we had to really persevere, sometimes working in a group and sometimes independently. These included lots of teamwork games, mini golf and having to build a tower out of spaghetti and marshmallows! Owl class came to teach us how to play board games and we loved making friends with the older children. We had to work on our resilience and problem-solving skills as well as having lots of fun!

Term 3 

Welcome to an exciting new term in Squirrel class! We hope you have all had a brilliant Christmas. This term our topic will be Travel and Transport. We will earn about different modes of transport and place them on a timeline of when they were invented in history. What different modes of transport have you used in your life?

For more information about our learning this term, please see the PDF documents at the bottom of the page.

Christmas Jumper Day!

Week 6 

In outdoor PE we have been building on our ball skills from last term and using them to play football! The children have learnt how to plant, point and pass the ball with the inside of their foot. We have also practised scoring a goal! In indoor PE we have been learning how to hold a strong, balanced pose and put them into a sequence using rolls to travel across the mat. 

       

 

Week 5

In Science we have been learning all about how to sort animals into different groups based on their key features and characteristics. Our final lesson was to conduct an investigation into herbivores, carnivores and omnivores. We had to look at the animal 'droppings' and decide if the animal was a herbivore, carnivore or omnivore based on what they had eaten!

   

Week 4

In Geography we began to learn some simple map making skills. We imagined an alien was coming to visit our school and he needed a map of the Badger garden! We tried to make simple maps by drawing key features and positioning them relatively to each other.

     

 

Week 3

As part of our 'Where I Live' topic, the children have been learning about the differences between towns, cities and villages. We learnt about some key differences and looked at the nearest town, city and village to our school. Then we sorted pictures of different places into the 3 categories.

          

Week 2

In indoor PE we have been doing gymnastics! We have been learning how to make different shapes with our bodies and using our muscles to keep our shapes strong. Then we performed them in a sequence. 

 

Week 1

       

In Maths the children have been learning to represent numbers in different ways. They have shown numbers as objects, pictures, in tens frames and as words. 

Term 2

Welcome back to another exciting term in Squirrel class! We hope you have had a fun and relaxing half term. Our topic this term is 'Where do I live?' where we will be learning about our local Geography. For more information about our learning, please follow the links at the bottom of the page.

Week 6

Daniel, our school chaplain from The Bridge Project, led a workshop with us about the Christian story of creation. We imagined we were creating the world with God and we had to design our very own brand new animal. Where will it live? How does it move? What will it eat? We had great fun and had lots of creative ideas!

   

In Art we drew self-portraits. We used mirrors to look carefully at our features and where they are positioned on our faces. We also looked at our skin, eye and hair colour. The results were fantastic!

     

Week 5

In our ball skills PE sessions the children have been working on their throwing and catching skills. They learnt how to catch properly by keeping their eyes on the ball, standing on the balls of their feet and keeping their hands open. 

              

 

Week 4

In Maths this week the children have been exploring the concepts of 'wholes' and 'parts'. They then used cubes to experiment with splitting a whole group into two parts.

      

 

Week 3

As part of our 'All About Me' topic, we are learning about self-portraits in Art. To start off the topic, the children explored how objects can be used to give meaning in portraits. The children chose an object which represented something about them (maybe a favourite hobby or favourite subject at school) and used them to pose for a portrait photograph. 

   

Week 2 

In indoor PE the children have been working on their balancing skills. We imagined that we were pirates walking the plank and we had to balance a 'hat' on our heads!

        

The children have been scientists this week! They have been learning about the names of different body parts and which body part is associated with each of the five senses. 

          

In our Maths lessons, we have been learning how to compare size using words like 'narrower/wider' and 'taller/shorter'. The children compared the width of different objects and put them in order from narrowest to widest.

      

Week 1 

The children have had a brilliant week settling into Year 1. We had a visitor cause some chaos in our classroom! It turned out to be...the Gruffalo! The children were being detectives and used the clues he left to make predictions about who had visited us. We will be using the Gruffalo as our text to inspire our writing this term. 

 

In outdoor PE lessons we are learning ball skills. We started with the key skill of passing the ball using the inside of our foot and stopping it using the sole of our foot. The children worked really hard despite the hot weather and enjoyed cooling off under the willow tree!